The do’s and don’t’s of prototyping…
Published in
2 min readApr 26, 2017
The essentials to remember before you prototype!
As Berlin product agency, we’re big believers in the build-measure-learn loop. We also believe in sharing our methodology — so here are our top tips to help you prototype, as written by Senior Product Designer Daniel Bollien.
Do…
- Set your goals and KPIs for the testing and know the questions you want to answer. If you don’t have them set before the test, you cannot tell if the prototype passed your quality gates.
- Set yourself a time limit before building the prototype. If it takes too long, think about whether there is a different approach to test your assumptions.
- Include your team, especially the developers — to have a clear idea of what is possible in the final product.
Don’t…
- Add too many features. Your prototype will get too complicated to update and build. In most cases it is better to build one prototype for each question or assumption you’re testing.
- Tell the user how much effort you’ve made to build that prototype — it will bias the user.
- Be a perfectionist — a prototype doesn’t have to be perfect. Far from it! Interviews can work well if there are some mistakes in the prototypes… it gets people talking, and that’s exactly what you want.
